This is a clarification regarding existing DreamHost policies on the use of services for personal storage/back-up purposes.

Please note that DreamHost services are intended for the purpose of hosting web sites (item #6, Material Products), and files uploaded to your accounts should be provided with the intent of distributing them to others from your hosted sites. With exception of our Files Forever service, we do not support the use of our hosting services for personal file storage or back-up purposes and the use of your hosting account for that purpose is prohibited.

Well, they got me on that one. I didn’t read the ToS that closely, so I’m left with two things:

A sense of genuine relief that the item on my futz list that reads “trickle backup – dhost – deb qos softs?” never made it past the “that’d be cool” stage.

A sense of embarrassment that when I encouraged friends to sign up for Dreamhost, part of my usual pep-talk was “and there’s a ton of storage, so there’s your offsite backup.”

6 Mount a Remote Drive Locally (depending on how you’re using what goes on the drive)

5 Run a Version Control System with Subversion

4 Build an Internet Jukebox with Jinzora

3 Set Up a Virtual Private Network with Hamachi

2 Remote Control BitTorrent Transfers

1 Securely Proxy Your Web Browsing Traffic

No, I’m not going to go buck wild and get a new provider. Dreamhost has a lot of advantages. On the other hand, I’ve been paying $20 a month for an account on the premise that I was paying for space I could use for things I actually could not. The Wayback Machine indicates that in January of this year I could have been paying half as much for a plan that would have suited my allowable needs. And that’s been the situation for some time, really. The Wayback machine just stops showing the tier page earlier than 2006.

Why are they bringing it up now? I don’t know. The page that used to have the service tiers indicates that there are two. And if you read the long, long blog entry about the company’s history, you eventually learn that everyone’s under the “Happy Hosting” plan now. So maybe with an influx of people who used to have much less disk space, they’re concerned their customers will start getting bright ideas about what to do with all that storage.

At any rate, my fault for not reading the usage policy more closely. And it’s time to go through ~/ up there and make sure any stuff I’ve got laying around is appropriately webby. If you’re sharing space on my account, please do the same.

It’s also time to make sure that converting the account I’ve got right now won’t break anything, because they’ll continue, apparently, to collect an extra $9 per month until their incremental account conversion is complete.